Stalker who harassed Billie Piper banned from going near star’s home

Billie Piper's stalker has been banned from being near her home
Dave Benett
WEST END FINAL

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A stalker has been banned from contacting Billie Piper after admitting harassing the actress at her north London home.

Philip Andrew Jerome, 40, sent letters to the stage and television star, showed up at her home unannounced, and posted cards through her letterbox.

He admitted stalking Piper, 35, between December 21 last year and February 15 this year, pleading guilty at a hearing at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court last week.

Jerome, of Eastleigh, Hampshire, was charged with “pursuing a course of conduct which amounted to the stalking of Billie Piper, and which you knew or ought to have known amounted to the harassment of her, in that you attended her home address and posted cards through her door, and sent letters by post to her home address”.

At the court hearing last Wednesday, magistrates banned Jerome from contacting Piper or going to the area of north London where she lives. He was ordered to carry out 180 hours of community service within the next year, and to pay £170 in court costs and fees.

Jerome pleaded guilty to stalking under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997.

This is the second time Penny Dreadful star Piper has been targeted by a stalker. In 2001 Juliette Peters was spared jail for a hate campaign against Piper, then a pop star, in which she made a string of phone calls threatening to cut off her head, burn her, and shoot her parents.

Piper was forced to give evidence about her ordeal at Peters’s trial, but was spared a similar experience this time after Jerome pleaded guilty.

The star shot to fame aged 15, after scoring a No 1 with her debut single, Because We Want To. She later moved into acting, with a starring role as companion Rose in the rebooted Doctor Who. She has been seen on screen most recently in BBC2 drama Collateral.

She is now an acclaimed theatre performer and was named best actress at the 2016 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her West End turn in Yerma.

She has been divorced twice, but is still close friends with her first husband, the TV and radio star Chris Evans. She was married to fellow actor Laurence Fox for eight years and the couple have two children.

In 2016 she said coping with the pressures put upon her as a role model were often tough.

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